A question inspired by the Dieter Rams documentary

What have we given up?

Last week I invited a few of my colleagues to see the world premier of Gary Hustwit’s outstanding new documentary, Rams, a sparkling, smart, surprisingly touching film about legendary product designer Dieter Rams. (Hustwit is himself a master of his medium, having skillfully explored other design arcana in the documentaries Helvetica and Objectified.)

Teaser for the Rams documentary

The film left me feeling inspired and reinvigorated. It also surfaced a question, one that’s been on the periphery of my thoughts lately: How did great product design come from small teams that rarely did focus groups, user research, design sprints, a/b tests, split tests, user acceptance tests, and so on? Or, put another way: Does all our modern hoop-jumping really result in better products?

First, some background.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dieter Rams and you work in any capacity related to product design, go educate yourself. Start with his 10 principles for good design. (If you want a book for your library, this is it.) Rams is the product designer’s designer, an icon whose impact is indelible. When I discovered his work as a student, something clicked. His ethos shaped my understanding of the design trade. Even now, decades later, I find myself revisiting his 10 principles whenever I question my professional bearings.

Rams relentlessly pursued user-friendly design through reductionism, ergonomics, materiality, authenticity, and function. His body of work exemplifies the Buckminster Fuller quote, “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

ET66 calculator: so beautiful, it encourages use

Which is to say, his designs—while austere—are eminently human and humane. The documentary makes clear that, at every turn, Rams considered the end-user, the person who would own and use the products he designed. If you’ve ever used or touched one of his products, you get that. Every detail is thought through. It’s no wonder Jony Ive cites him as a singular inspiration for his own work at Apple.

“Dieter Rams’ ability to bring form to a product so that it clearly, concisely and immediately communicates its meaning is remarkable…He remains utterly alone in producing a body of work so consistently beautiful, so right, and so accessible.”—Jony Ive

In Rams’ day, the designer was almost solely responsible for knowing how to achieve success, and the process was simple: design it, prototype it, build it, sell it. Designers had to have confidence in the validity of their instincts and experience, and an innate sensitivity toward, and understanding of, human nature. Designers relied on an internal north star as their guide. I may be simplifying things a bit, but having worked with several Rams-era creative directors in my past, I’ve seen firsthand their go-it-alone approach to design.

“Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That’s its role.” — Dieter Rams

Rams wasn’t unique in his approach: this was the era of design luminaries like Ray and Charles Eames, artisans who used their skill and intellect to create supremely beautiful yet humane products. Their goal, like Rams, was to make life just a little bit better. They believed high design could also be purposeful, usable, and affordable. The resulting products easily stand the test of time, as desirable today as they were at launch—and often far more durable.

“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”—Charles Eames

Ray and Charles Eames

There’s an almost Platonic sensibility at work here, a design ethos that suggests some things are simply universal; that good design isn’t conditional, but is immutable and follows core principles founded on empathy, compassion, ethics, and aesthetics.

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.”—Dieter Rams

And so, the thought that’s stuck with me since seeing the documentary is this: Have we, as design professionals, lost our way? Have we ceded our expertise, our craft, to the “wisdom of the crowd”? Has something changed that prevents us from creating quality work without seeking input and consensus at every turn? Who among us hasn’t felt the ire of having to justify a design decision we knew, instinctively, was right? Or, at least, right enough.

I believe strongly in informed design. I recognize the power and value of research, collaboration, feedback loops, and iteration. I believe a big part of a designer’s job is to be a synthesizer of truth.

Yet I believe in design expertise. I believe our value isn’t just in interpreting but innovating. I know gut feelings can be wrong, but I’ve also seen exhaustive feedback loops result in utter failure when a designer’s instincts were discounted or ignored. I believe in design processes that manage risk, but I also know without risk, innovation is impossible.

And I’ve been designing long enough to see patterns others don’t, and sometimes those patterns belie what our research is telling us; sometimes what we learn isn’t as useful as what we know.﻿

Dieter Rams

I’m glad I saw Rams when I did: I’m currently starting a design initiative that, for a variety of reasons, has to be pretty seat-of-the-pants. We’re going to move fast with scant input from external sources. We’re going to need to trust our expertise, reflect on our experience, and rely on our gut instincts. I can’t hope to be Dieter Rams, but I can try to channel his sense of conviction.

Product teams: stop asking what you can do, start asking what you can stop doing

What if the path to a better product experience is defined by doing less for your users, not more? Stripping away features. Removing touchpoints. Reducing options. Simplifying.

This isn’t a natural way for product teams to think: to a hammer, everything is a nail, and to product teams, everything is a feature. It’s in our DNA. We make things. We’re builders. We ask ourselves, “What can we do?”

But maybe we need to get into the demolition business. Blowing things up. Looking for the fluff and cruft that drags us down. The features that aren’t converting. The options that aren’t scalable. The stuff users said they wanted, but never use.

If you’re on a product team, you know what I’m talking about. For reasons political or inertial, unloved features collect like cobwebs in the corners of your experience. Stuff no one wants, but even fewer people are willing to kill off. But it doesn’t end there. Oh no, we’re just so excited to add more stuff.

When was the last time you heard about a hack week where the goal was to kill—not build—features?

Feature creep starts with the best of intentions and ends in disaster. Users don’t know where to focus. They become disoriented and frustrated, worn to a nub by the paradox of choice. Meanwhile, we end up supporting things we shouldn’t, spending our already limited time reacting rather than evolving.

I love t-shirts, but I have a rule: no new ones until old ones go. Sure, saying goodbye can be hard: “But I got this at that awesome Flash conference in 2000!” But say goodbye I must. Anything that has a permanent stain? Out.Poor fit? Goodbye. Moth holes? See ya! After I drop it off at fabric recycling, I never think about it again. Poof, gone. My t-shirt drawer is manageable.

This is how we should approach product development, too: no new features until we kill some old features—and periodic pruning! Look at analytics, talk to users, and discard the stuff no one really wants. Do it gracefully; plan an exit strategy; deal with change management. Breathe deeply. Repeat.

How is this feature still missing from iOS?

I’m one of the few people who still balances his checkbook monthly. I’m all about Inbox Zero. I thrill over productivity apps the way most people hard crush on CandyCrush. In other words, I’m pretty Type A. But is it actually possible I’m the only person who wants to assign names to my photos in iOS? It would make finding them so much easier for me.

I’m aware that Photos has all kinds of smartness that lets you search by date or location; it supports automatic facial recognition (which is surprisingly good); it can identify the setting or subject in a photo. All of these features make finding photos easier than not, but they lack the specificity of a title.

Memories…like needles in a haystack

For example, I have a million—hyperbole, sort of—photos of my sons that I’ve shot in and around New York City, often in a playground or park. Those AI-fueled search features won’t help me find a specific shot. You know, the kind of shot you want to be sure to mark for future reference. Not just kid in playground, but kid in a playground eating his very first shaved ice. Or, riding without training wheels.

There are just some photos I want to name. I want them to have a descriptive title. Apple knows this, or they wouldn’t have made it possible to do so in the desktop version of Photos. (It’s clunky and imperfect, but it works.) Somewhat surprisingly, I haven’t even found a third-party app that would let me change titles, either. Metapho, an outstanding little app for seeing and adjusting a photo’s intimate data, lacks access to titles.

An example: a while ago I shot a photo of two nuns on a subway sharing a rather interesting (to me) moment (see photo above). Recently, I wanted to share it with a friend, but I couldn’t remember what year I’d snapped it. Because it was in the subway, no geolocation data was attached to the file. And while Photos will try to identify the subject matter, niether nuns nor subway were cutting it. I made several guesses at date, and fortunately I found the photo again, but it could just as easily have been lost to the winds of time.

Apple is a research-driven company. They must know what users want, and so perhaps I’m in a tiny minority on this. Nonetheless, naming photos is the kind of feature that would make some of us—maybe just me—very happy.

I was asked this question on Quora. Here’s my response.

For nearly a decade, Adobe completely missed the boat on what UI designers were doing, so we made do with Adobe Photoshop (and, for a while, ImageReady and Fireworks—good times!), but it was a less-than-ideal tool for the challenges we faced. It’s to Photoshop’s credit, Swiss Army knife that it is, that it had such a long run as a UI design tool. It wasn’t purpose-built for UI design, however, and with time its shortcomings became untenable.

I remember being surveyed by some smart Adobe researchers back in 2006; I shared my workflow with them, mentioned the kinds of features I was longing for, and explained where their products were falling short. Adobe responded to our needs in fits and starts. Apps like Muse were interesting, but were slow to evolve and ultimately didn’t address our needs sufficiently. Most of us continued to wrangle our way around Photoshop.

Around the same time, Adobe transitioned to an expensive subscription model that lumped all their apps together in a bundle that was unaffordable for many of us. We were paying a hefty monthly fee for apps we’d never use, and still didn’t get the one app we really needed, a purpose-built UI design and prototyping tool. Some of us switched to alternatives like, gasp, Keynote. (Don’t laugh: Keynote is fast, decent for drawing, supports styles, exports to HTML, and comes with every Mac. In fact, its UI seems to be a precursor to several modern UI design apps.) Nonetheless, that silver bullet UI design tool escaped us…and Adobe.

Keynote, looking like Sketch before Sketch was a thing

Then, in 2010, the lean, mean upstart Bohemian Coding launched Sketch which, in short order, ate Adobe’s lunch. At just $99, Sketch was affordable and did what designers needed. At this point, Adobe probably should have released a comparable product or perhaps tried to acquire Sketch outright. I’m not sure Bohemian would have gone for such an arrangement; they seem like a pretty rebellious band of warriors.

Nonetheless, Adobe must have seen the beauty and power of Sketch and realized it was worth acquiring. Perhaps they underestimated the burgeoning UI design and prototyping market. I find that hard to believe, however, since they were doing a lot of market research; I myself was polled twice, in person, by Adobe researchers. And I took many online surveys for Adobe, too. Maybe Adobe heard us, but management ignored the findings.

Some have suggested that Adobe didn’t consider acquiring Sketch because it was Mac only, but that theory doesn’t hold water. For one thing, Adobe’s often launched products on one platform first. For another, most UI designers were on Macs anyway. And, Adobe has the engineering muscle to have kept the Sketch UI and workflow, but re-built it so that it was compatible with both Mac and Windows. Moreover, when Adobe finally launched their “Sketch killer”—initially as Project Comet, later renamed XD—it was Mac-only, and the eventual Windows version lagged behind the Mac version for some time.

We may never know why Adobe didn’t try to purchase Sketch. What we do know is that Sketch is now the de facto standard for UI design and prototyping while Adobe, the longtime giant of desktop publishing and photo editing, has been sidelined in this arena. Even upstarts like Pixelmator and Affinity are giving Adobe a run for their money in the photo editing and vector design market. Nothing is sacred.

Adobe XD and Sketch: who’s zooming who?

At this point, XD is a solid tool—but it’s no Sketch killer. Its features aren’t as robust; it lacks the community and third-party plugin support that Sketch enjoys; and it doesn’t integrate with nearly as many apps as Sketch does. It’s like looking at a reflection of Sketch in a slightly blurry mirror.

Meanwhile, the market is shifting again, and even Sketch is facing competition from apps that promise to bring UI design, interaction design, and animation into a single experience. See, for example, Framer, Figma, and the nascent Invision Studio.

So what should Adobe do? Do they continue developing XD, hoping to catch up to and ultimately outpace all the competition? That doesn’t seem like a great bet. Should they scramble a tiger team to develop an entirely new product that’s closer to where the market is headed? Or should they just cede the UI design and prototyping market altogether? It’s a less-than-ideal position for such a venerable company to find itself in. Then again, that’s what can happen when you don’t listen to your users.

There’s an axiom in business that it’s harder to correct course when you’re successful than when you’re struggling. Adobe was flying high and they simply didn’t see the warning signs ahead, or they ignored them altogether, letting a tiny competitor dominate a market they could have—and probably should have—owned.